Egypt’s intellectuals rediscover Nasser

Egypt continues its close alliance with the United States but is giving increasing leeway to public opinion, which is often highly critical of the US. This new freedom has resulted in a blossoming of books, press and TV in a “paper democracy” in which the secular left and conservative (often Islamist) circles are making common cause. But with a number of paradoxes...

by Richard Jacquemond

At a time when each election (parliamentary elections in November
1995 and local elections in April 1997) confirms the closure of the
political options, and when the government of Kamal Al Ganzuri (who
took over from Atef Sidqi in January 1996) is strengthening the
neoliberal economic orientation adopted in the wake of the Gulf War
(1), Egypt’s cultural and intellectual scene is a place of intense
debate.

With the benevolent compliance of the state, a range of different
ideologies are being expressed, sometimes widely divergent from
official political and economic policy. The situation is doubly
paradoxical: while creative artists and intellectuals enjoy a freedom
of expression the like of which has not been seen since 1952, the
talk everywhere is of censorship. And at a time when the strategic
alliance between Egypt and the United States is more solid than ever,
with Cairo maintaining its commitment to the “peace process”, the
authorities are giving free rein to a movement of nationalist opinion
which is highly critical of the pax americana.

In order to explain this twin paradox, we should first describe
the phenomenon known in Egypt as “paper democracy”. The political
opposition is increasingly kept out of positions of real power, yet
it enjoys a tremendous freedom of criticism through the printed media
that the parties are permitted to publish. Furthermore, journalists
from across the board have recently shown remarkable militancy in
defending their professional rights. After 12 months of mobilisation,
they finally succeeded in winning the re-examination of a law which
was threatening their freedoms, using the pretext of the fight
against defamation. In a parallel development, for the first time
since the nationalisation of the press in 1961 there has been a
blossoming of national and regional dailies and periodicals,
numbering upwards of 500 and all more or less independent of the
political parties (2).

For instance the weekly Al Dustur, launched in 1996 by key
figures close to the liberal opposition Wafd party and staffed by a
team of young journalists, very soon won a sizeable readership (it
claims an average distribution of about 100,000 copies) by bringing a
new tone to journalism - a skilful blend of sensationalism,
free-handed critique, and intransigent nationalism. Al Dustur
is printed in Cairo and circulates almost solely in Egypt, but it is
published by a company based in Cyprus, which means that it can
sidestep the constraints imposed by Egypt’s press laws. The other way
of getting round censorship, used extensively by the literary
avant-garde, is to bring out journals at irregular intervals, so they
can be presented as “non-periodical books”.

In a further paradox, the vitality and openness of intellectual
debate in Egypt has a lot to do with the fact that the government, by
breaking with the monolithic policies of the Sadat era and
reconnecting with some elements of Nasserism, has permitted the
expression of diverse tendencies and opinions within its own cultural
and media apparatuses. Over the past ten years, the leftist secular
intelligentsia which had been sidelined during the years of
“counter-revolution” (the presidency of Anwar Al Sadat, 1971-81) has
made a remarkable comeback, and, importantly, has given the
government the means to regain the ideological initiative in the face
of the Islamist opposition. For example, much use is made of
editorials, essays, and televised broadcasts and soap operas (3),
which now serve as official government ideology - the tanwir
(or “enlightenment”). This basically involves promoting the leading
figures, and the values, of the Arab nahda ("renaissance"):
patriotism and tolerance, religious belief and rationalism, freedom
and reformism.

From this derives the second paradox. At a time when, at the
economic level, the state is falling into line with the neoliberalism
imposed on it by its Western sources of funding, it has decided, in
order to “sell” this model of society, to revive cultural and media
policies inherited from the Nasser years. For instance, the field of
book publishing has seen publishing projects very similar to those of
the 1960s, when the market was flooded with political and ideological
pamphlets sold at very cheap prices (which did not stop them piling
up in the warehouses of the nationalised publishing houses).

For example, each year since 1993 the state-run publishing house
General Egyptian Book Organisation (GEBO) has pursued a huge
publishing project under the rubric “Reading for All”, which has Mr
Mubarak’s wife as its patron. This has involved publishing or
republishing hundreds of works, among which are reprints of the
Egyptian classics, such as Tahtawi, Taha Hussein, Ali Abderraziq,
etc., alongside tracts such as “Enlightenment versus Obscurantism”,
“Terrorism and Extremism”, as well as authors of the modern literary
avant-garde. All these are produced and distributed at modest prices
ranging from 25 piastres to one Egyptian pound (less than 50 cents)
in conditions that are totally opaque (the millions of sales claimed
are less than credible) and often in breach of copyright too.

However this government alliance with sections of the secular left
also exacerbates tensions and contradictions within the state sphere.
In particular, between these new scribes and the conservative
intelligentsia which, in alliance with institutional Islam, is intent
on defending positions that were acquired in the course of the 1970s
and have since been consolidated by a long period of trade with the
regimes of the Gulf.

The contradictions are all the more intractable because the
government appears to be trying to have its cake and eat it. In other
words, it allows institutional Islam to pursue its quest for
religious legitimacy, while at the same time cultivating its
intellectual allies to provide a “liberal” and “modern” image for
domestic, and above all overseas, consumption. This occasionally
produces bizarre results. For instance, every year the GEBO
publishing house hands out book prizes at the Cairo Book Fair. It
recently awarded a science fiction literature prize to the “Islamic”
writer Mustafa Mahmud, the successful author of a number of essays on
the Muslim faith and of the very popular TV science programme
“Science and Faith”. The prize was for a theatre piece entitled “A
Visit to Heaven and Hell”!

A “Law of Diminishing Freedoms”

This reconfiguration of the cultural and ideological terrain explains
the symbolic, and occasionally physical, violence of the polemics
which divide the intellectual elite. These crystallise around a
freedom of expression which has taken serious knocks in recent years
(the attempt on the life of Naguib Mahfuz, winner of the Nobel Prize
for literature, on 14 October 1994; the Nasr Abu Zeid affair (4); the
ban on Yussef Chahine’s film “The Emigré”, etc). One needs to
go beyond the most visible fracture line: that is, the dividing line
between those who want Egyptian culture to adopt “universal” canons,
and those who insist that it must be framed within an Islamic (or at
least, to take account of the Coptic minority, religious) ethic and
aesthetic. A closer analysis reveals an array of positions that are
more complex than the conventional opposition between “secular
liberals” and “anti-freedom Islamists”.

For example, the “liberal” camp is deeply divided between
supporters of a “freedom with responsibility” - who are the majority
and proponents of “absolute freedom”, a minority position except
within the artistic and literary avant-garde. Some weeks before the
attempt on his life, Naguib Mahfuz wrote in his weekly column in
Al Ahram: “Freedom of creation means on the one hand a freedom
of thought, and on the other a freedom of expression... Thought
should enjoy absolute freedom, because it is exercised by elite
spirits, and one need not fear that they will succumb easily to the
siren voices of error. But artistic expression is much vaster than
this: it embraces the human experience in its intellectual, emotional
and instinctual aspects... and its audience extends to include the
illiterate. This is why it must observe decency, courtesy and taste.
If these are respected, art will come to no harm (5).”

A few months previously, a professor of law, a well-known
campaigner in the field of secularism and human rights, explained:
“To demand freedom of opinion and expression without restraint or
limit would be socially irresponsible and culturally disastrous,
given that we live in a society where the majority of the population
is illiterate, and where the values of dialogue are absent... All of
which makes opinion a social responsibility rather than a personal
freedom (6).”

This elitism translates into a system of state censorship which
functions by means of a “law of diminishing freedoms”. The larger the
audience of a given medium, the more tightly it is controlled. This
means a great amount of freedom for books - since books have a
limited circulation - and a bit less for the press (no
pre-publication censorship as such). But there has been - since a new
law was introduced in 1992 - a general pre-publication censorship for
all the audio- visual media (cinema, theatre, audio tapes, video
cassettes, etc.) This is organised by the directorate for censorship
of artistic works, which comes under the ministry of culture, and is
relatively flexible. Finally, there is a much stricter
pre-publication censorship, under the ministry of information, for
radio and television. While this censorship may be contested in one
or two of its decisions, the principle is barely contested at
all.

What is contested, however, is the increasingly frequent
encroachment of a censorship “from below”, exercised on religious or
moral grounds by people who have no legitimacy on the cultural scene,
often with the support of institutional Islam (in the shape of Al
Azhar’s academy of Islamic research). These may be lawyers seeking to
justify the ban on films such as Yussef Chahine’s “The
Emigré”, typesetters and editors demanding changes in the
texts on which they are working; or the publisher who censored and
altered more than thirty novels by the well-known writer Ihsan Abdel
Quddus, who died in 1990, in order to be able to export them to Saudi
Arabia!

All this is happening just as a wave of writers and poets who
reached adulthood in the early 1990s, in other words around the time
of the Gulf War, are arriving on the literary and art scene.
Resistant to any notion of commitment, this “post-Islamic” generation
(7) is extending and deepening the experimental work pursued by its
elders from the 1960s - people such as Sonallah Ibrahim, Gamal
Ghitany, Edouard Al Kharrat, etc. Like these figures, they are
calling loud and clear for the writers’ and artists’ right to
autonomy: in other words, that it should be the right of artists
themselves to define the criteria of appreciation of a work, free
from external political, religious or moral considerations.

This collective dynamism among Egypt’s writers has translated into
a remarkable “mini-revolution” in the Writers’ Union, which was
formed in 1976 at a time when President Sadat’s government was
cracking the intelligentsia into line. This rump union used the
occasion of its elections on 4 April 1997 totally to transform its
executive board, including, for the first time since 1976, some of
the country’s best writers and script writers (Baha Taher, Mahfuz
Abderrahman, Wahid Hamed, Gamal Ghitany, Ibrahim Abdel Megid, Ibrahim
Aslan, etc.). Having been elected on a programme in which,
remarkably, the defence of professional interests came before
political demands, they then proceeded to elect as union president
Saad Al Din Wahba, an old hand from the cultural apparatus under
Nasser, and then Sadat, who won the esteem of his peers by his
opposition to the Camp David agreements and his fight against
“cultural normalisation” with Israel.

At its first important demonstration, on 29 April 1997, the
revitalised Writers’ Union presented, in an unprecedented step, what
amounted to a programme of collective action for the defence of
freedom of expression. At the same time, it set up a commission of
inquiry, as a prelude to eventual sanctions to be taken against a
number of writers accused of having maintained relations with Israel.
This decision inevitably provoked unease. In 1995, the Syrian
Writers’ Union had excluded the poet Adonis from its ranks for the
same reason. The problem here is that to deny an author freedom of
expression in the name of some greater “national interest” is perhaps
to find oneself on the same side as those who seek to censor art and
literature in the name of “protection of the fundamental
[religious and moral] values of society”.

The only single issue capable of bringing together Islamists,
liberals, Nasserists and Marxists is the rejection of “cultural
normalisation” with Israel. That is also the only terrain on which
the young literary and artistic avant-garde - otherwise hostile to
all ideologies - is willing to express an explicit political
engagement. This is indicative of the strength of this position of
principle, which is almost unanimous among Egypt’s intellectuals, and
which has grown stronger since the election of Binyamin Netanyahu. It
is something which brings together proponents of an absolute
rejection of the “Zionist entity” as a matter of principle, and those
for whom a refusal of collaboration with Israel is more of a
political weapon in the peace negotiations. However, this principled
position tends to paper over real differences of attitude in relation
to the Jewish state.

All this is quite to the liking of the political class which has
shown itself to be quite adept of playing two different tunes at the
same time: being both exasperated by the pro-Israeli stance of the US
administration and attached to its status as a mediating regional
power. On the one hand, it gives behind-the-scenes support to
initiatives such as the “Alliance for Peace” in Copenhagen (8), but,
at the same time, it allows the mass of intellectuals, the only
section of the population with the means to make its voice heard, to
give free vent to a visceral nationalism, a last recourse in the face
of the frustrations bred by the new disorder in the region.

(1) In that period Egypt was “compensated” for its
decision to support the US-dominated alliance by the cancellation of
half of its national debt, on condition that it set in motion a
programme of structural adjustment and economic reform. This
remission of debt ($12.3 billion) has taken effect in three
successive tranches, each of which was linked to the adoption of
specific measures (privatisation, financial orthodoxy, etc.) and the
final tranche of the cancellation, planned for July 1994, only came
into effect two years later, since Egypt’s tactic was to conform to a
minimum, and as late as possible, to the conditions set by the
International Monetary Fund.

(7) A term used by Gilles Kepel in “Le Monde des
livre”, 12 April 1997.

(8) In a Danish initiative, about 50 Israeli,
Palestinian, Egyptian and Jordanian personalities met in Copenhagen
last February to sign a manifesto in which they pledged themselves to
work for Arab-Israeli peace. Since this happened at a time when
Israel was adopting a particularly hard-line position, and since the
document was formulated in terms relatively unfavourable to the
demands of the Palestinians, the “Copenhagan Manifesto” created an
angry outcry in Egypt and the Arab world. See Mohamed Sid-Ahmed, “Les
intellectuels arabes et le dialogue” in “Proche Orient, la paix
introuvable”, Manière de voir, no. 34, May 1997.